More Government Snitches Coming to Your Vehicle

Maybe it’s better put as “Your Vehicle Snitches on You More.” The wonderful ODB-IIport on our cars has gone beyond letting your car’s mechanic know which parts are bad or which pollution-control laws your car has been violating. There are cases in Canada and now Michigan where the police have been extracting information from cars to issue tickets and to provide as evidence in court. (Check out ODB-III, which makes things much worse.)

“When the vehicle crashes, we want to make sure that the first person who gets access to the data is the owner,” says Tom Kowalick, chairman of IEEE Global Standards for Motor Vehicle EDRs, as well as an author of seven books on EDRtechnology. “Right now, no data is secure. There are 20,000 tow-aways in America every day, and none of them has secure data.”